Master The Think or Swim Scanner

We start off by resetting the scanner. Note that our Stock Hacker and the Option Hacker are one in the same.

Top Level Scanning Filters

The first thing you always want to do when building a scan is use top level filters to narrow the search of the platform and help increase the speed of the scan. Top level filters include things like all optionable stocks, all nyse stocks, all nasdaq stocks, etc… We also have the ability to include or exclude tickers from other lists to avoid redundancies.

Once we have top level stock scan filters in place we can start to think about the condition groups that make sense for our particular scan. More often than not you will find that the all of the following makes the most logical sense when trying to narrow your results. We also have the capacity to look for none of the following or any of the following.

Adding Primary Stock Filters

Next we have to start adding filters. There are four main categories; stock filters, option filters, fundamental filters, and study filters. We NEVER advise that anyone uses the pattern filters as technology hasn’t quite been able to match the human touch.

Stock filters are related to the stocks price and volume. Everything that has to do with shares can be found here. Option filters are related to the stocks option chain. Everything having to do with option pricing, greeks, and volume can be found here. Fundamental filters are related to the companies financial health. Everything about their finances should be filtered for here, including dividend information, earnings per share, etc..

Custom Study Filters

Study filters are related to technical analysis. We can scan for different types of candle stick patterns, when earnings are coming up, what specific indicators are reading, or how they compare to other indicators, and most importantly we can generate our own custom scan criteria in this window. This is perhaps the most powerful and under utilized piece of the entire Think or Swim (ToS) trading application.

Saving Scans To Use Again

Once we build something that we like we can save the scan as a query and load it to a dynamic watchlist in the side bar. Or if we want to generate a static list we can use the save to watchlist function under the scan button menu. Dynamic watchlists will update automatically as new results start meeting the criteria of the scan.

If you want alerts from the program when things are added we can do that too by creating alerts that are pushed to you phone and or email address.

Lastly we run through a live example of using the think or swim scanner to scan in the pre market for optionable stocks that could be in play. The main thing to note about these scan examples is the huge emphasis that is placed on the liquidity aka volume filters. Once the bell rings we tweak things just a bit to look for regular trading hours volume and start the process over again.